Our Life, Love and Pursuit of Happiness… (and home renovations)

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One of our family traditions since before I can remember is getting a new Christmas tree ornament each Christmas. My brothers and I each had a series that we collected and we would always get that one and often others each year. My Mum would diligently pack each ornament away at the end of December into 3 separate tubs one for each kid. This year as we set up our first tree my Mum came over with my tub of ornaments. Garret was completely shocked that the entire tub was mine. (personally I just think he is jealous that he doesn’t have a pile of his own ornaments…maybe I should get him some this year?)

Since I have 32 years of collecting ornaments under my belt I have to say that I have amassed quite the collection. I didn’t want to overwhelm our tree so I just picked a few to see the light of day this year. (also part of the decision making process is we only had a few ornament hangers and I couldn’t be bothered buying more. I am becoming a cheapskate in my old age I guess)

My maid of honour got me this as a Christmas present this year. I bought ornaments for her two girls so she bought us one for our fur baby

This has been my favourite ornament forever. It says 1980 on the door so that is a fave for quite a while. You can see a little chipmunk inside setting up his own tree. LOVE IT!

This is an ornament that my Nana Shaw(who died before I was born) made for my Dad. I thought it was so super special when I was a kid and I loved that my Mum gave it to me. It says “Love Mom 1977” on the back.

This one is new this year as well! My MIL found it in her travels and it reminded her of Brooklyn. Note the cute little tutu!

From my Mum last Christmas…first year in our new home!

This one my friend Lauren made me in 1991! This made it on also by default for coming with it’s own ribbon

First Christmas together! My friend Erin M got me into the s’mores decorations a few years ago…how cute are they?

This guy is from a few years ago

The series that I collected are called Mary’s Angels I adore them but can see why Garret might not want a tree chock full o’ angels. So they will stay in the Christmas tub for this year.

I do love it when I see the gorgeous themed trees that people do each year, but I am not sure if I will ever be able to bring myself to do that. One of my favourite Christmas memories is when we would set up our tree. My brothers and I would pull out each ornament and reminisce about them and funny other stories of Christmas past. This is definitely a tradition I would love to keep up with our future Walsh offspring.

I am realizing in my haste to post every day I am failing to take good pictures or truly edit some of my posts—note to self: better planning would make for a more successful NaBloPoMo…there is always next year. I always have my iPhone on me, and during our renovations our Nikon has run out of batteries and I put the charger somewhere safe, where I wouldn’t forget where it is. So obviously I have no freaking clue where it is. And so you are treated to blurry camera phone pictures of the newest exciting developments in Walsh life….Yesterday my husband (yup still cant stop saying that without smiling) finished building me a closet. Granted it’s the guest room closet, but it is AMAZING regardless. Current plan is to store perhaps some out of season clothes as well as bedding and other random goodies in here for now. Garret has an annoying/endearing (?) habit of hanging up ALL 500 (conservative guess) of his T-shirts so perhaps this can be his dedicated T-shirt hanging closet? We shall see, as for now it is a catchall everything closet as we havent finished the hall closet or our bedroom closet.

In real life it is more exciting and not remotely yellow

Please note the additional shelves for more storage….oooh baby…SO exciting

Saturday we went down to Niagara to celebrate some 30th birthdays. Excellent time! The only downside to visiting many wineries in one afternoon is that it is hard to stay awake past supper.

Slighting boozy smiles with Ashley on the bus

My prince Charming and his wine filled glass slipper

We went to 6 wineries and had yummy tastings at each one. G and I bought a few bottles to put in our wine cellar/basement…we laugh because we always have lofty plans of having a bit of a collection, but then the wine mood hits and we break into our stash and that is the end of that. We managed to rally and make it out for supper, but by the time the gang was heading out to the bar we were both so full of food ready for bed. The Walsh’s are a fan of sleep! Sunday morning we had breakfast with the gang and headed back home to do some work on the house.

Kevin had stayed over on Saturday and finished laying the flooring down in our bedroom. One step closer to a finished space! We had also discussed making the linen closet a bit smaller to allow for a bigger nook in our walk in closet. So we came home to:

a wee doorway for small dogs and house elves to enter our closet

G demonstrating the door way

Kevin had started cutting it out so he could put flooring all the way through. Glorious, Glorious flooring! Last night G cut out the rest of the wall. We will be moving the wall back a foot, and then I think building some sort of shelving in the closet for…you guessed it! More storage! We also spent some quality time at Rona trying to pick out a colour for our bedroom. Originally the plan was white, but then we noticed that there are approximately 200 different shades of white (a less exciting version of 50 shades of Grey perhaps?) The choice ended up being “Risotto” which is a lightly more cream/taupe colour. As of late we have been pretty pumped with our spur of the moment paint choices so I am hoping that this also works out so well. Garret has one of his flex days today so he is at home working today…very excited to see what I get to come home to! I love having such a handy hubby. (*side note, first time I have said hubby HA)

While Garret is worrying about how our old uneven floor is going to cause problems for installing the new floor….I am already starting to think about what we can do next. As I have complained about countless times before, we have no storage space in our house. In fact we have a really weird teensy walk in closet in our room and a linen closet in the hall way and that is it. Storage space is scarce n our parts and we have been trying to think of some creative solutions that also look nice. My mum came across the below two images which I think would be perfect in some combination in our bedroom

1) Our bedroom is pretty small so the shelving on either side wouldn’t be able to be too wide

2) The ceiling in our bedroom is slanted (there is no attic over our bedroom so the ceiling sort of follows the pitch of the roof) Therefore we don’t have a ton of height to work with.

So I think we will end up having to fiddle with a few things to get it to work. G wants to build something himself, but I am trying to convince him that we should start with an Ikea shell and go from there. There are just so many projects that require our attention around the house that the ones where we can cheat and get it done in an afternoon? I’m all for those. Plus I have heard that building Ikea furniture together is a really good marital test so hey why not?!